I talked before about my thought process and the start of my browser. I did some more on the browser but it all got a bit annoying and not exciting enough to keep my attention.
Well since then Iv used selenium a lot at work which includes a firefox extension that provides an IDE. Iv hacked a little on it and looked around trying to work out how to do various things and generally understood a bit more about firefox extensions. Enough indeed to get me looking more and more at firefox extensions and finally I understand enough to write my own.
So... now Iv written the plugin that started me writing my own browser. Dont really need that browser anymore... it was interesting and I may still go back to it yet - but for the moment Im now happy with firefox again. I say happy, I mean mostly satisfied!
Firefox code is quite fun - if you like javascript - which I do have a sick fascination with. Im not sure the XUL/firefox docs are that great but then browsing source always keeps me more interested than reading straight forward docs anyway. Chromebug (firebug for XUL) works quite well - tho Iv had to revert to writing my own debug log functions which is annoying. Im too used to firebug and using its console.
I probably should of mentioned what my extension did by now - it keeps activity information associated with each tab ( Im calling activity any clicking/scrolling/key pressing ). It then provides a menu item to show a dialog with a list of all your tabs sorted by activity. You can select many items at once and close them. This means I can quickly close all the tabs I havent touched in X amount of hours.
Iv also added to the plugin a way to quickly assign a shortcut key to a tab so I can skip around. Kind of like temporary bookmarks.
What Id really like is to drop tabs altogether and go for something a bit more interesting to choose what Im looking at... also Im thinking I should start using bookmarks in some clever way... but this is for another day.
Extension is here http://github.com/dunkfordyce/dunks_gubbins/tree/master/tooomanytabs/
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